Tom:                      Hello Ladies and gentlemen and welcome to another episode of under the microscope. I am your host Tom Jenks and today I am interviewing Dr. John Boyd, a world leading psychologist who is championing the research and use of time perspective. He is doing this alongside Dr Philip Zimbardo who I am sure many of you have heard of over the years and they are really the world leaders in creating the methodology through this creating the theories of time perspective and today we discussed all of that. What an absolutely incredibly interesting conversation this was and I’m so glad I’m able to share this with you guys and that I even had the opportunity to do it. Now before we jump straight in, I’m just going to give a quick overview of what time perspective is because we dive headfirst in on this interview so it might just help some of you guys out there. So time perspective is the way that we unconsciously categorize time, future, present and past and use it to influence our decisions in the present in the now. For example, some people, if they’re making a decision, will look towards the future. What are the outcomes, what are the consequences? Some people were looking to the past what happened last time I was in a similar situation and some people just make a heat of the moment decision. Now it’s not to say that you are one or one of the others, however you are a mix of all of them and in different situations you might be leaning towards a different time perspective. However, I discussed all of that and more with Dr. John Boyd today and I can’t wait for you guys to listen. However, just before we pop into the episode there is an announcement that I would like to make. John and me would like to dedicate this episode of Under the Microscope to Dr. Robert Levine, who sadly passed last week. He was a professor at the Californian State University at Fresno, and it was actually Dr. Levine and Dr. Philip Zimbardo who started out and pioneered the research on time perspective, leading to what it is today. He was a mentor, a friend and he shall be missed by all those who’s lives he touched and certainly by those who are working on his legacy of time perspective today. And with that… here is the interview.

Tom:                      Hello Ladies and gentlemen, I am your host Tom Jenks. And today I am joined under the microscope with Dr. John Boyd, a world leader together with Dr Philip Zimbardo in championing psychology to a wider audience. Once again, thank you for joining me today, John. Um, to start, why don’t you just go ahead and explain a bit about your background, what you research and your interest in psychology?

John Boyd:          Sure. So I’ll start at the beginning. I suppose. I went to UCLA and studied economics and, uh, I figured I really didn’t know what I wanted to do back back then and I figured I could either study English cause I’d be using that or I should study economics because I would be using that no matter what field I ultimately went into. And by the time I was a senior at UCLA, I was a little bit disillusioned with, with, uh, with school, I’d worked at IBM as an account manager and was, was looking for something a little bit different and wanting to kind of broad my educational background and I took a class on reading Freud and I, I knew very little on Freud that that point, uh, it was led by a psycho analyst who had worked with Bruno Bettelheim and it, it changed my life. Uh, I had heard pretty negative things about Freud, uh, but I found them to be very insightful, very smart, very compassionate, and a trying, I felt to do the right thing for people that otherwise weren’t being served, um, by, by medical professionals during his time. And from that, I became interested in clinical psychology and thought that I would, would um, yeah, become a clinical psychologist or a psychiatrist, but I left UCLA, spent a year teaching computer classes on an army base in Germany, a US army base for the university, University of Maryland. And uh, it was lonely, I lived out in the German economy, worked on an army base and one day in the middle of winter, this is I guess 1990 or so, I was walking home with a just an arm full of psychology books and social psychology books specifically. And I decided well, you know, until I figure out what I really want to do with my life I know that I like psychology. I know what that, I like social psychology, I’m reading these books for fun, let’s pursue it. And that’s, that’s what I’ve done ever since. I moved back to California where I’m from the Central Valley, town called Yuba city and moved to Sacramento, started taking psychology classes and ended up at Stanford, uh, working with Phil. And, uh, really, really fortunate to have had that worked out. I moved from, from really just social psychology to thinking about how would we extreme explain the most extreme behavior that, uh, that was manifest at that point. And for me, uh, and unfortunately it’s may still be true. It was suicide bombing. So, so, I started to think about, well, if we could explain why people are willing to kill themselves in the service of some other, uh, for some reason, maybe it would, it tell us a lot about us. Um, more normal people and noraml there’s not really any one normal I suppose, but

Tom:                      No, for sure.

John Boyd:          But maybe that would help us understand, uh, less severe things.

Tom:                      And so you’ve really made a cool transition from a, something you weren’t really sure in and you’ve managed to really pursue a career in something maybe totally different through, I guess, your own passion and fortunate meetings, I guess.

John Boyd:          Well, I think as a social psychologist, um, well, one of my favorite movies is Forrest Gump and Forrest, Forrest Gump is a simple person who, who just through kind of life forces around him has a really extraordinary life. And I think as a social psychologist. Most of us have lives that are buffeted and shaped by external forces that we, we often times don’t fully realize. And yes, certainly from, for me wanting to be an economist to actually wanting to be a pilot first than an economist and a clinical psychologist. And then a social psychologist was, was a big, big change it and how I got involved with Phil is it, so I was interested in extreme acts, a suicide bombing and things like that. Then I started to think about religion in the psychology of religion. But then, uh, uh, made a transition basically after reading a lot of social psychological research that, uh, talked about beliefs in and attitudes outside the context of any structured religion. And that’s, that’s what led me to two time perspective and working with Phil I, while I was at Sacramento State. I worked on what I called the post future time perspective and the post future time perspective is the period of time after the imagined death of the physical body. And it is in many ways as real as next week or next month or next year is just an imaginary state in the future where most people, most people in America certainly think that they’re going to exist. Yeah. And my thought was well, goals, it can be, I’m sorry Tom, I think you dropped there just uh, just briefly, but

Tom:                      No, sorry. You carry on. I didn’t want to interrupt.

John Boyd:          But goals, those goals that can be reached next week or next month. Like a graduating from college or buying a car or going to a party, they, they’re extinguished. Ah, they, they go away over time. It at the very least at it, they go away when our physical bodies die. So they’re, they’re motivational. Value in some ways is limited. There’s a step path theory of motivation that says that when you reach into, the closer you get to the goal, the more motivational power has. And that it, that it, it extends for some period in the future. But for goals that are accomplished in what I call the mundane future, uh, they, they ended when people die and thinking about the, the what I called the post feature Phil, renamed the transcendental future. Uh, it’s a period of time, uh, uh, uh, abstracts a period of time in which goals can last for in people’s minds, eternity. And again, to take to any religious connotation away from, from that, it’s these are beliefs people have, these are attitudes people have towards time. And I did some work on it and showed that a transcendental, the future is actually a viable time perspective. I shared that with Phil and that’s what led to our or first collaborations and me taking a little bit different perspective on how attitudes towards time shape people’s behavior.

Tom:                      Oh, that’s really cool. So for some of our listeners who may be, don’t know what time perspective is, can you just give like a quick general overview? So you were talking about transcendental future, whereas people base their actions on what may happen after their life, be it getting into heaven or avoiding hell, these kinds of things. So can just give a quick overview of what time perspective and other perspectives might be.

John Boyd:          Sure, of course. So what time perspective is ruling just the attitudes and beliefs that people have about time. I’m in the, the attitudes and beliefs don’t have to reflect reality. They were just held by people in the use. These beliefs determine how we behave. Phil and I would argue that all of us come into the world as present hedonistic babies. We want our needs gratified immediately. We don’t want to wait. Uh, we’re not patient. We’re not thinking about the future. We want what we want and do what we want it now over time though in the Western world, we have social institutions in, in uh, activities, family activities. They can inculcate us with more of a future orientation. And the Western world education gets people to show up for uh, for school and time to turn in assignments on time to go through classes and years and a very, very structured way. And through education most of us learn a future time perspective. We also, as we age, develop a past time perspective and from what I identified, two different versions of past type perspective of past positive in a past negative as the names imply. People that have, are high in past negative time perspective tend to bring with them into the future, bringing with them into the present negative things that have happened to them in the past. Whereas people that are high on past positive tend to remember the best, the most positive aspects of their experience and to carry that with them into the future as well. So we also identified a, uh, a second. So, as I’ve already mentioned that the present hedonistic time perspective, a present fatalistic type perspective, which essentially is a, is the belief that nothing that I do today is going to impact or change the future. That my actions are essentially not, um, don’t matter. Uh, just kind of fatalistic about time. Fatalistic about life. So we’ve got two paths, past positive, past negative. We have to present, present fatalistic, present hedonistic, and then then we have the, the future time perspective, which we learned through education. And that is setting goals and saving for the future and saving for rainy days, things like that. And then we also have the transcendental future time perspective, which we talked a little about earlier. And so my first job working with Phil in graduate school was to develop this Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory that included five, five of those time perspectives so that we could measure it and once we had measured type perspective. We started to look at how it relates to other, other aspects of our lives and one the main takeaways from our work is that, um, although we start as present hedonistic kids, uh, and most of us learn a future orientation primarily through educational experiences, some of us don’t, and some of us stay more present hedonistic and not planning for the future. Putting today over tomorrow, uh, and a kind of a predictable pattern of behavior that puts pleasure today over a pleasure tomorrow. Or anything else tomorrow. So some people don’t learn future orientation and others, uh, like, like I would guess, uh, perhaps you and some of your listeners learn future orientation too well, at least something to Phil and I I did, uh, in, in, in, and by that we, we put tomorrow above today in most of our daily actions. And what happens in that case is we often times forget to really relax and be fully present in the present and enjoy ourselves. Uh, so for example, if you have a party, you want to invite lots of present hedonistic people because they’ll be fun and you don’t want to invite people that are really future oriented or exclusive future oriented because they are going to be thinking about the work they need to do when they get back to the office or home or the next day. So one of the main takeaways from our work is that all of the time perspectives in themselves are not necessarily good or bad, they’re all valid. But when people start to use, uh, the view of the world through the Lens of a single type perspective, most of the time, and they don’t match their time perspective with the situation in which they find themselves, uh, then there are issues. So the present hedonistic person, obviously at a party, you want to be present hedonistic and they would fit right in. And a future oriented person, when they’re in a social situation, a party situation, you’d want them to slide more, more into a present hedonistic approach or perspective so that they actually enjoy themselves. And there’s been subsequent research that has shown that there are additional time perspectives out there. I have no doubt that there are many different attitudes towards time. That are yet to be discovered. Uh, Phil and I were just early on, uh, investigators and we’ve identified six or selves.

Tom:                      So what you’re saying with your research is people depending on the way they view time and such, that’s how they base their decisions. So if we’re looking always towards the future, that’s how they base their decisions now or whether they’ll do a heat of the moment decision. it’s interesting you said that I might be quite future oriented. Um, cause I actually took the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory and I scored like quite low or most but then future it’s straight up like straight up above the average. So maybe I even need to focus a bit more and being present hedonistic and pass positive. But as you say, people aren’t going to be one strict type. Uh, you want people to be like a, an overall and you’ve given a on your site a optimum and people can go check out the and find out what they are. They, if they had to the timeparadox.com I’ll put a link in the description of the episode if you’re curious and it kind of shed some light on, maybe you’re focusing too much on the future or you’re focusing too much on the past negative and it’s kind of controlling the decisions you make, which not everyone’s aware of that.

John Boyd:          That’s exactly right. And I would say that even in of its self scoring high on the future time perspective is not a good or a bad thing, but if you, but if you only score high on the future time perspective, that’s where it could be problematic. So, so ideally you’d be high on the past nega–, or excuse me, you’d be high in the past pqositive it’d be, it’d be moderately high on, on present hedonism. So you can actually enjoy the present and you’d be higher on the future as well. Uh, and relatively low and present fatalism in and past negative time perspectives. So it’s the balance and it’s the skill and ability to shift between time perspectives and attitudes towards time, uh, in liu that help us enjoy our lives but also plan so that we can enjoy them years in the future as well.

Tom:                      Yeah. Um, since you guys are really cut the pioneers of time perspective, uh, psychology, um, how did you come up with this methodology to test and how has that changed over your career?

John Boyd:          So Phil and another psychology professor named Robert Levine published an article in psychology today and I like 1984/85 and they had a, a rudimentary time perspective inventory, uh, Phil did in that and the method that we used when I showed up, I feel it already already started it back then. I got to stanford in 1994. So Phil had been working on it for awhile before I showed up. It’s a relatively standard psychometric skill building, a approach and the assumptions underlying it are that we can’t just simply ask people, how high are you on the present hedonistic time, a time perspective or the past negative time perspective. But what we can do is we can ask them individual questions that they can respond to. And then using different statistical techniques, factor analysis, the primary one, we can see how those questions group together and we can’t measure a construct like pass negative type perspective directly, but we can measure responses to painful memories from the past predominantly come to mind. And that and other related questions help us answer or, uh, to, to, besides the time perspectives, through multiple small questions that can be grouped together in a meaningful way. And in factor analysis allows us to identify, uh, what we would call latent constructs, and latent construct is just a kind of a fancy word for, for ideas or themes or attitudes that are not really conscious. Like nobody would be able to say that I’m high on future, uh, just without really understanding time perspective. But they measure things indirectly and through lots of iterations, lots of questions and doing factor analysis that helped us group the questions together. And it also helps us identify the different factors themselves. So, um, starting out, you basically have a list of say a hundred questions you give them to people. And then through factor analysis you can identify that, okay, we have five factors here in these, uh, of these hundred questions, 60 of them actually are significant predictors are significantly related to these underlying factors. And then it just through multiple iterations over time, uh, we identified the five factors on this Zimbaro Time Perspective Inventory and the transcendental, future and have shown them to be valid and reliable measures of what we call time perspective. And the interesting thing about factor analysis is that it tells you which questions are related in and what the factors are, but then you get to name those factors. So the names the past positive past negative, uh, present hedonistic, present fatalistic future, transcendental future were all things that Phil and I came up with. In fact, I had mentioned that I had first called the, uh, the post future of what I had first ca;;ed the post-future, Phil renamed it the transcendental. And I think that’s clearly a better, a better name.

Tom:                      It’s very interesting. It’s very good to, I think, understand where our methodologies come from because psychology is very different to say other sciences where you do something in biology to a cell and you get a definite result. Whereas psychology is kind of in the consciousness of the subject, maybe do you find, you run into some biases if people maybe aren’t being honest when they answer these questions or is that something you can’t account for?

John Boyd:          There’s no doubt we’d run into biases and one of the, one of the largest biases, not in only people not being honest, but in the, in the questions that that Phil and I developed there were no doubt biases based upon our own backgrounds and prejudices in the end. The experiences, uh, in one to two examples of that, there’s, one is since we published this work, there’s been a lot of work on what Phil calls a wholistic present. And it is a being in the present and bringing parts of the past into the present and bringing parts of the future into the present. It’s a little bit more of a, an Asian approach, a Buddhist approach perhaps. Uh, and, and clearly that’s it. It exists. It’s been validated. It’s just not something that Phil and I, uh, uh, expected to be part of, of our time perspective because we saw what you saw time perspective as being a little bit more discrete and not kind of all encompassing, uh, as a kind of an eastern approach. And yet, another example is when I was in Grad school, there’s a professor from Africa that was interested in, in time perspective and he collected some data and I did an analysis and it was clear that the factor structure from that data was quite different than the fact that factor structure that Phil and I had with, uh, really, uh, largely psych one, uh, participants. So those are, it’s not that, that, uh, there are type perspectives, like the wholistic type perspective that that exists that we just haven’t measured it. Uh, certainly the, the African sample there were, would be type perspectives there if we really understood how to ask about it in the first place. So those are certainly biases to begin with. And then I think depending on the situation in which somebody took the, the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, the inventories, there would be self presentation, uh, biases as well. If you take it as a job application probably people would score more highly as uh, uh, on the future time perspective. If you, if you take it as people, even a holiday, they may score higher end present hedonistic.

Tom:                      Yeah. That’s cool. Um, it’s interesting what you say about the different cultures having maybe not predetermined but a disposition to certain time perspectives. Um, that was a study done in Lancaster University and they showed that uh, British and Swedish people, uh, because of how they use that language actually perceived durations of time slightly differently. So for example, a British people use a short and long, they use distances to describe time passing. And uh, it was Greek and Spanish that use quantities like big and small. So it’s interesting that you’re saying different cultures and maybe even there’s a link to a language about a predisposition to certain time perspectives. Would you say?

John Boyd:          I absolutely. And there are some indigenous tribes in South America that don’t really have the concept of time in their language. So certainly that is going to change change even the questions that you can asked them, uh, in, in something like a time perspective inventory. So, so absolutely I would also argue that time perspective, uh, is likely to evolve and change over time with culture. I think probably preindustrial revolution, uh, people were much more present oriented, uh, present fatalistic present hedonistic. Maybe even just kind of holistic present. And then with the advent of factories in, uh, assembly lines, people had to show up for work at the same time. The trains had to run on time, uh, and that changed our relationship to time. It’s, it’s clearly continuing to evolve, um, largely through technology, which is kind of a field that I fell into a separate from time perspective research. But, but if you look at the average disposable time that, that an American has, probably a comparable data in the UK. The average American has about five hours of disposable time per day. And that’s the time that we’re not working. We’re not eating, we’re not sleeping, we’re not taking care of chores, it’s the time where we should be able to be, be ourselves, our most authentic selves. If you look at technology, people are on apps about half of that time these days. It, I think that for me that’s a troubling, troubling, um, change because I, it’s hard. It’s hard. There’s lots of research that shows that we’re not nearly as conscious and thoughtful and rational as, as we’d like to think we are Kahneman’s book “thinking fast and slow”, a great summary of that. Uh, and technology I think has the potential of unconsciously pushing disposable time out of our lives and that will not change our relationships to dieing potentially change our time perspectives as well.

Tom:                      Definitely. Uh, one thing I wanted to touch on was, what, uh, for our listeners would be the real world applications of having this time perspective revealed to people. I know you’ve done some work in different communities. Do you have an example maybe of something you’ve used the time perspective with?

John Boyd:          So the work that I did with Phil at Stanford, we, we worked with students in community high schools. These were students that had been essentially kicked out of standard high schools and they were in one room, one room schools with teachers and, and, and um, there were essentially security guards. They, a lot of these people, uh, uh, had been behavioral problems. They’d had academic problems, they had drug problems and this was there last stop at community school before being kicked out of the public education system. And what we did is we went in every day for two days [he means weeks here] and we ask these students to, uh, mentally, mentally simulate in that, mental simulation, is essentially to visualize something happening in the future. And we started with having them visualize things that could happen, goals that they could accomplish the next day. And we progressively extended it out. So at the end of the, the two week a study, I think we were five years down the road and we were able to change their time perspective. Uh, unfortunately it went from high on the scale, the future time perspective, scale. It actually significantly went down. And, uh, how we explained that was we, we had taken what was essentially a, a poorly defined concept, future time perspective and really helped to teach them some rudimentary future type perspective skills. And, uh, it was a really rewarding study because the students themselves, uh, it, it told me things like they set a goal and it actually happened and that had never happened before in their lives. So that was a really early, early phase. But I think that, uh, it certainly at a mirrored the process of our normal educational system, but it’s just a little bit more focused and precise. So I think that’s, that’s one way to extend, extend. Uh, juvenile delinquents I think would be the, again, the label that we might give to them. They’re time perspective. Um, Phil and the swords had done a lot of work around post traumatic stress disorder and past time perspectives. I think there’s a real opportunity to, to help people sort through issues in their past by thinking about abought it through the Lens of time perspective I think is, as we mentioned earlier, uh, I’m concerned about disposable time and the automaticity of our, our world, especially our technological work. And I think that we all need to more consciously balance our past, present, and future, uh, uses of time so that we don’t just get sucked into playing solitaire, uh, eight hours a day, uh, or, or you know, fortnight. I’m sure you’ve heard a fortnight the game, I could play it. I go, I know if I start to play just like everybody else, it’s going to suck up a big chunk of my life and they’re there are already enough things that suck up a big chunk of my life that aren’t really under as conscious good controls I would like them to be.

Tom:                      That’s it… It’s getting the balance between, yes, looking towards the future and setting yourself goals, but also living in the, in the present isn’t it, there’s getting that balance correct.

John Boyd:          That’s exactly right. And I mentioned early on about Forrest Gump and about how I’m a little bit like Forrest Gump, I think we’re all a little bit like Forrest Gump or our lives are buffeted by the forces around us and technology is buffeting us in new ways and it’s buffing even in ways that are through notifications and they were just becoming a little bit more stimulus response and we’re not taking the time to step back and reflect upon who we are now, who we want to be tomorrow. And to balance your time perspective, we’re just being getting sucked into, uh, a new world, the technological world.

Tom:                      Yeah. All right. Uh, so I have one final question for you that I’ve asked a couple of scientists that I’ve, I’ve interviewed. So last week we recorded a podcast looking the time, which is where I came across your work and so I wanted to ask you as a psychologist who works kind of to do with time, uh, how would you define time? A big question.

John Boyd:          Wow.

Tom:                      But how do you reckong you would define time?

John Boyd:          Okay. How would I define time? I think time is the, it’s the subjective process through which we stitch the moments of our lives together and it helps us make sense of who we were, who we are and who we would like to be. And I think the part of the subjective part is very important there because the course of our lives, um, to us are quite meaningful. But time has, has very different scales for, for insects that live hours or days and for galaxies and solar systems that live for billions of years, it’s our experience of, of change in the world and change of ourselves and, and change things around us.

Tom:                      That’s an incredible answer. I think one of my favorite answers I’ve got so far.

John Boyd:          Well, if you could, if you could tell me whether it was right or not, I’d really appreciate it. [Laughter].

Tom:                      And uh, I think, I think the world would, no… No one’s got the answer. I think the, the one that I kind of fell in line with was the more physicists side of entropy is the time is the, the decay of order a second law of thermodynamics. As everything kind of leads towards disorder.

John Boyd:          Yeah, but only at certain times scales, I would argue if you look at the, the timescale and sort of of lives and in our society we are in many, many ways fighting back quite successfully against entropy.

Tom:                      We are, yeah.

John Boyd:          And if we give ourselves another billion years [inaudible] I’m a Niger, the entropy will, will win, but we can fight back at least in the timescales I think are relevant to, to our lives.

Tom:                      Oh, definitely. We do seem to be creating order as a civilization, uh, across this planet for now

John Boyd:          And disorder at times too. But [Laughter].

Tom:                      Oh, lots of disorder. Definitely disorder. That’s the balance we seen to Australia.

John Boyd:          That’s right. That’s right.

Tom:                      All right, well I want to say thank you so much for joining me again, it was an absolute pleasure to have this conversation with you and for you to spare some of your time to speak with me. Uh, it was amazing. Um, is there anywhere for people to find your stuff?

John Boyd:          Sure. On the timepersective.com [thetimeparadox.com] Our website, um, all of it is there, and that that would be the place to go. You can take the time perspective, the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, and the transcendental future time perspective inventory and find more info there.

Tom:                      All right, amazing. So I’ll put that in the description for the listeners who are listening and want to check that out and yeah, again, massive. Thank you. That was amazing conversation.

John Boyd:          Well thank you very much Tom. I appreciate it and have a great day and a good time.

Tom:                      Thank you.

Tom:                      And once again that was Dr. John Boyd. What an incredibly interesting conversation. I feel so lucky to have had the opportunity to have had that and one of the most interesting things about time perspective for me is the applications that it has and it’s still just an unexplored field at the minute. We are literally having an interview with one of the pioneers, one of the two or three pioneers in the world of this topic of research and I think that’s an incredible opportunity even in itself. Now, as I said, I’m going to link the episode description to thetimeparadox.com. This is where you can take your own Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory and find out maybe where you line up and don’t forget. We’ve also got the new series going on at the moment called the methods section that comes out on Fridays where I just delve a bit more into a shorter format. Just me talking more about how to conduct science and all of that malarkey. Uh, we have the conduct science podcast which has now moved to Thursdays and this under the microscope will come out on Wednesdays whenever the weeks that we have an interview next week. Hopefully, we should also have one ready for you guys, so I’m very excited to bring that to you as well. Now it’s going to be a very interesting one based around volunteer science, but that’s it from me this week. Guys under the microscope, if you want to check out all the latest goings-on, you can head to conductscience.com you can find us on Facebook and Twitter by searching @conductscience. If you want to suggest a guest or a topic, please feel more than free to do so. And maybe even if you want to ask us a question, use the #AskConducScience. We’d be more than happy to help answer those on the show. We will be checking them daily, but as I said, that’s all from me this week under the microscope. So I will see you guys. A-next time.